And that requires swallowing our pride here, right? Like we actually need to learn from China, even though US politicians don’t want to admit that.
Yes. I think that we should all swallow pride. My personal philosophy is that if anyone wants to serve me shit, my answer is always going to be: “Please sir, may I have another?” That’s just how we should all be living.
Engineering Gone Wrong
Do you think tech companies prefer operating in an engineer-led country like China, rather than America’s lawyerly society?
Companies generally prefer having some degree of rule by engineers. Because engineers are much more focused on doing very rational things, like figuring out how to build a great subway system. Perhaps their regulations are also more rational.
That doesn’t mean lawsuits everywhere are bad. Sometimes companies have a great time suing each other and protecting their intellectual property. But, in general, a common sentiment among business elites is that China’s government understands us. You see this with Elon Musk, praising China’s premier who helped him build the Gigafactory in Shanghai.
But you also wrote recently that entrepreneurs and executives can sometimes feel miserable because the Chinese government changes its mind very abruptly.
Sometimes it is the case that the engineering state treats a lot of the society and the economy as simply another engineering problem. They try to engineer the population, first from not having kids, and now, into having more kids, or the economy, from valuing profitable sectors to delving too much into sectors that better serve the national interest. And these efforts often backfire, because the economy and society are not relatively simple systems like a really big hydroelectric dam.
One of the core conclusions you draw is that an engineering-led government is supposed to make more rational decisions. To some degree, I agree with you, but I also don’t know if I can trust the Chinese government to always make a rational decision. That kind of uncertainty, isn’t that bad for companies?
Yes, I think six years of living in China made me realize that a government could be too efficient.
This idea of being fixated on a specific target and just charging at it at full speed.
That’s right. And having lived through the zero-COVID experience, I think something I’ve realized is that the line between rationality and irrationality is kind of blurry.
Did that experience influence your belief that China should be 50 percent more lawyerly?
It would be good if people had some way to assert themselves against some of these horrible things, like the one-child policy. I don’t worry that China will ever become quite like the lawyerly society, and be unable to build almost anything at all. It would be great if China could have some actual procedural safeguards, and for the US to have reasonable costs associated with building infrastructure in reasonable timelines, too.
This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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